5 little grebes (good for this site), 2 female mandarins, a pair gadwall, young noisy great crested grebe (2nd brood?), and a nuthatch picking a hazel nut off the ground and flying off with it. While this is 'doing what it says on the tin', I've never seen it before, and it looked incongruously large in a small bird's bill. Has anyone ever seen nuthatch actually opening a hazel nut?

Also, someone has 'pruned' the fences near the worst muddy bits, and where there are viewing points over the lake, so it's more accessible, if more people would like to visit and put in reports for this interesting East Somerset site!

hi Dan, Nuthatches normally jam hazel nuts into a crevice or rough bark and hammer into it like woodpecker you can hear them tap tapping in the wood behind us, it`s a exercise to find them. good birding Chris Thorne